MP3's Are Not the Devil

Author Orson Scott Card says pretty much what my opinion on the file-swapping/music biz is.

The record companies swear that it's making a serious inroad on sales, and they can prove it. How? By showing that their sales are way down in the past few years.

It couldn't possibly be because (a) most of us have already replaced all our old vinyl and cassettes, so all that windfall money is no longer flowing in, or (b) because the record companies have made some really lousy decisions as they tried to guess what we consumers would want to buy.

It couldn't possibly be that they've targeted all their marketing at precisely the market segment -- high school and college students -- who are most likely to be sharing MP3s over the internet.

Maybe if they started marketing more music that people my age would enjoy, they'd find that, lo and behold, there are customers who prefer to buy music the legal way!


Also, they fail to take into account that we are in a slow econonmy, and the fact that the market that they have created is one where everything is the same as everything else. What if every book out there had to follow the exact same formula, with the same style and tone, with only minor variations to avoid lawsuit? Then it would be the same as the music industry.